Walter Appleton Clark

As a child, Clark drew sketches for his own amusement, and at 15, he spent a profitable summer in Jackson, New Hampshire, taking drawing lessons from a local artist.

In 1894, Clark resigned as a cadet in good standing and enrolled at the Art Students League of New York,[2] where he studied under William Merritt Chase and Harry Siddons Mowbray.

[a] Joseph H. Chapin, the art editor of Scribner's Magazine, discovered one of Clark's drawings on a classroom wall and gave him his first commission, to illustrate a story by Rudyard Kipling.

[5] In 1902, Clark married Anne "Nancy" Hoyt of Greenwich, Connecticut, and the following year the couple moved to France, where they lived in Paris and Giverny.

"[8] In 1905, the Clarks returned to New York where Walter regularly met with his friend, James Montgomery Flagg, the men being engaged in parallel jobs as magazine illustrators.